The Chinese authors also state that these people were already in possession of the Confucian classics, and had attained to an unusual degree of literary culture. Their officials were divided into twelve ranks, which was also the ancient Japanese number. In the method of divination, in the wearing of flowery costumes, and in certain forms of etiquette, they and the Japanese were alike. As is now well known, the ancient form of government of the Yamato Japanese (that is, of the conquering race from Corea and the north) was a rude feudalism and not a monarchy. Further, the central part of Japan, first held by the ancestors of the mikado, consists of five provinces, like the Kokorai division, into five clans or tribes. At the opening of the Christian era we find the people of Kokorai already strong and restless enough to excite attention from the Chinese court. In 9 A.D. they were recognized as a nation with their own “kings,” and classified with Huentu, one of the districts of old Chō-sen. One of these kings, in the year 30, sent tribute to the Chinese emperor. In 50 A.D. Kokorai, by invitation, sent their warriors to assist the Chinese army against a rebel horde in the northwest. In A.D. 70 the men of Kokorai descended upon Liao Tung, and having now a taste for border war and conquest, they marched into the petty kingdom of Wei, which lay in what is now the extreme northeast of Corea. Absorbing this little country, they kept up constant warfare against the Chinese. Though their old kinsmen, the Fuyu men, were at times allies of the Han, yet they gradually spread themselves eastward and southward, so that by 169 A.D. the Kokorai kingdom embraced the whole of the territory of old Chō-sen, or of Liao Tung, with all the Corean peninsula north of the Ta-tong, and even to the Tumen River. This career of conquest suffered a check for a time, when a Chinese expedition, sailing up the Yalu River, invested the capital city of the king and defeated his army. The king fled beyond the Tumen River. Eight thousand people are said to have been made prisoners or slaughtered by the Chinese. For a time it seemed as though Kokorai were too badly crippled to move again.